Yesterday a power fault stopped my Mac Mini, and on resumption of power the Mac would not restart. Since the System controls heating, lighting, security, etc., then getting it up and running again quickly was an imperative.
I have another Mac/Indigo setup, with its own license, for testing purposes (it stops me messing up the house control system to often as I try new bits of hardware), but in this instance I just wanted to use it as a working Mac, and get the normal 'home' license and software running on this Mac Mini before sorting out the failed Mac. Fortunately I had an almost up to date backup of the Indigo database (Indigo 7.02) and the python scripts that run a lot of the functionality. However, I met with a couple of issues:
i) The two macs have different user file structures (e.g. different user names). Within scripts, I reference a file path stored in a variable, which enabled me to accommodate this, but within Indigo itself it appears uses absolute file paths for python files called from triggers etc. so all of these needed updating. The only workaround for this I can think of for the future is to set up 'user' or 'all user accessible' folders which are the same on every Mac, to contain all the python files, unless there is an embedded path variable within indigo you can access.
ii) Having got this system working, I have not been able to get the reflector working. I can control the system locally via Bonjour, but the system will not make contact with the reflector - what do I need to do to correct this. This is important for any rapid disaster recovery - remote access is a key facility the system provides. I suspect the underlying issue here is one of license control (although I have of course had to move the control stick over - the Aeon Labs Z stick gen 5, so the license is seeing some of the same hardware). If this is the case, things could get worse before they get better, as I need to know the old Mac will at least allow Indigo to run stably before I move back to that as the control Mac.
iii) I have got the failed Mac Mini working again - Apple (on a Sunday afternoon!) helped me rebuild the OSX (v10.10). However Indigo will not run properly on it. I have yet to try installing an older version of the database, which may restore this, but the symptoms are odd - i) when started Indigo performs normally for the startup process and then suddenly starts reporting an infinite series of errors into the log file at very high rate and completely overloading the processor, and ii) Indigohost remains active even when Indigo is forcible shut down, and even after a reboot of the Mac! - the only solution seems to be to to use the Activity Monitor app to force processes to close. I upgraded Indigo to version 7.03 in case Indigo had become corrupted, but the problem persisted. Hopefully I can resolve this by going back to an earlier version of the database (having got the system working at least in part I am trying to work through the issues steadily rather than cause more problems) - I assume it indicates database corruption but the symptoms threw me for a while, since the problem was not resolved with a reboot! Will post the results with an older database when tested.
Any input welcome! Is there an accepted protocol for managing a Mac failure (and associated license issues). Whilst they are impressively reliable, hardware failure is bound to happen sometime!
Regards,
Geoff